The world of SEOs is rapidly changing and we looked back on the many changes SEO went through in 2017 in order to predict its future prospects for the New Year. I spoke with Arya Bina, the CEO of Kobe Digital about new trends in the world of SEO and he mentioned these top 10 SEO tips to keep in mind going into 2018.
AMP Pages
More and more people are using their mobile phones to surf the internet and search and browse when they are out and about. So it is absolutely crucial to make sure you have set up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) for your website, so it loads super fast on mobile phones. This will boost your ranking by Google. Also, it is important that your website looks great on all devices and screens.
In addition, people are also increasingly using apps, so make sure to improve your website’s app search design.
Images and Infographics
“An image is worth a thousand words.” I’m sure you have heard the phrase, and it has never made more sense than for SEOs right now. Images, and especially infographics, can convey more information at one glance than words can in paragraphs. So make sure search engines know what your images contain by adding descriptive captions to your images. You should also make sure your images are optimized and download quickly.
Social Media
Today, social media is more than a tool to find old friends and keep in touch with family and relatives. Users now utilize social media platforms to search for content and brands they like and you should take advantage of this opportunity to optimize your social media platforms. Share quality content on your social media to grab people’s attention and encourage them to share your content, create social media contests to get more shares and add easily visible share buttons on your page. Learning about demographics and psychographics of your audience, which are already present on social media, is key to finding your target audience.
Secure Website
Changing your connection from HTTP to HTTPS can create a more secured and safe connection with the users. That is why Google gives a ranking boost to HTTPS sites and most sites on page 1 of Google are HTTPS. In order to do this, you will need a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, which allows a user’s data to be encrypted and secured.
UX
User experience is becoming increasingly important for SEO purposes, which is the amount of time users spend on a website and the amount of interaction they have with its pages, how much assistance they receive and the overall pleasantness of their experience with your website. Google uses this information to determine how useful a website is. You can track your UX and make improvements to your content, speed and interstitials to create a more engaged audience.
Voice Search
The rise of new trends such as voice search and digital assistants can greatly impact SEO strategies. Since they are more informal and conversational than the traditional way of searching, you have to make sure to include more natural language and long-tail search keywords in your content to capture this new trend.
URLs
Create easy-to-read and meaningful URLs. Meaningless and hard-to-understand URLs confuse search engines as well as visitors. Include hyphens in your URL, put top content in the root folder, use no capital letters in URLs, and block bad URLs with robots.txt.
Website Speed
The time it takes for each page to load is a critical factor, so get rid of anything on the website that slows you down, such as large images. You can also use Google Page Speed Insights to test the loading speed of your site’s pages and benefit from its recommendations to boost your website’s load speed.
Content
Update and refresh your old content regularly; this is a simple and great way to boost your ranking, since blogs and dynamic webpages are usually higher in ranking than static ones.
Link Building
Building links is one of the best ways to create high rankings. Do this by fixing your broken backlinks and focusing on links that bring real traffic to your website. Also use links that point to several competitors and make sure they point to yours too. You can link to other websites with similar content as well; the more links people click on in your website, the more trustworthy it becomes.
